1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an image processing apparatus, an image processing method, and a computer program product suitable for a teleconference system in which images are processed in real-time.
2. Description of the Related Art
In a teleconference system, a camera connected to a terminal that is deployed in each location captures images in the location. During a teleconference, participants in the teleconference need to adjust panning, tilting, zooming, and the like of the camera by themselves to fit the participants into the same image area captured by the camera.
Disclosed in Japanese Patent Application Laid-open No. 2003-230049 to automatize such an operation is a camera controlling apparatus that detects a direction of a sound source using a sound source direction detecting unit, automatically controls panning and tilting of the camera so that the image capturing lens faces the direction of the speaker, extracts a person's face from the image thus captured, and controls panning, tilting, and zooming of the camera so that the person's face thus extracted is displayed at a predetermined position in a predetermined size on a screen.
A camera controlling apparatus such as that disclosed in Japanese Patent Application Laid-open No. 2003-230049 often performs optimizing the captured image. For example, when an image is captured by a camera with a wide-angle lens, because distortions become prominent near the edges of the image, the camera controlling apparatus performs distortion correction.
If the speaker is captured at the center of the screen, distortions are not particularly prominent in the image portion of the speaker. In particular, when only the speaker is displayed in an enlarged manner, there would be no problem in view of the image quality even if the distortions near the edges of the image are not corrected. However, because the conventional technology performs distortion correction to the entire image where distortions are found, without determining whether such distortion correction needs to be performed, an image portion that is not actually displayed on the screen is also subjected to the distortion correction, and a delay is introduced by the distortion correction, disadvantageously.
Therefore, there is a need for an image processing apparatus, an image processing method, and a computer program product that are capable of reducing a delay introduced by the image correction.